New York Through Foreign Eyes

Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter. Over the weekend, I saw a terrific new photo exhibit in Beijing on that subject. The strange place, in this case, is New York, and the viewpoint belongs to Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and polymath. Long before he became famous as a sculptor and rabble-rouser, he spent a decade in New York as a no-name artist straddling the worlds of Chinese immigrants and contemporary art; his friends, it seems, included delivery boys from Fujian Province and Allen Ginsberg. Ai, it turns out, was also a compulsive (and disorganized) photographer; the current show’s organizers valiantly sifted the best out of a mess of some ten-thousand images that Ai shot in New York, between 1983 and 1993, to produce a satisfyingly eclectic ramble called “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993.” These same organizers plan to publish a catalogue and travel the exhibition internationally. Some selects follow, courtesy of Ai Weiwei and the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, in Beijing.

He has some living-room snapshots of friends on the cusp of becoming Chinese cultural royalty, including a young Tan Dun, the composer, and a very bearded Chen Kaige, shortly before the filmmaker won the Palme d’Or for “Farewell My Concubine” in 1993:

Most interesting to me are Ai’s images of some iconic New York moments, captured with the clarity and ignorance of a visitor. He happened on a young Presidential candidate named Bill Clinton, leaning desperately from a limousine, for one more handshake. He walked beside Al Sharpton (of the track-suit period) during a Tawana Brawley demonstration. He did his best Weegee impression in photographing police vs. protesters in Washington Square Park. In Ai’s photos, I see the experience of many foreigners in China or Russia or Iraq today; we are here on the margins, reading and watching. But these are not our places.